Blog - /Personal

This is a status report and continuation of my attempt to get Purdue to sign a disclaimer of interest for my contribution to the Free Software Foundation.

I found the person at Purdue who is in charge of approving the disclaimer: the Associate Vice President for Research and Director of University Research Administration and Compliance (name omitted). The office involved is the Office of the Vice President for Research Staff. This person does not want to sign the disclaimer form, primarily because of the provision about patents that might cover software that overlaps with what I've created. That particular provision is given below.

We affirm that we will do nothing in the future to undermine this release. If we have or acquire hereafter any patent or interface copyright or other intellectual property interest dominating the works, or the programs to which these works constitute changes and enhancements, or use of those programs, then the Free Software Foundation and the general public will be permanently and irrevocably licensed to use, in these works and in the programs they enhance, without royalty or limitation, the subject matter of the dominating interest.

One of the FSF's copyright assignment people has been trying to negotiate with this person, but unsuccessfully so far.

I've even found an FSF blog entry about assignment and Universities. I'm not sure whether it applies to me, however. First, I've started work on all of my FSF project before working for Purdue. Second, according to an unofficial conversation with someone who works for Purdue's CS department and has attended their copyright-related meetings, Purdue does not assert ownership of works that are authored by students unless the conditions as stated in my previous blog entry about this issue apply. I have been careful to not work on my projects during work time and on work machines, so I should be all right.

In summary, I'm going to keep contributing changes to my own software projects, including the Emacs source tree, until the FSF tells me that they won't allow it. The FSF should still be able to assert ownership of my contributions to these projects since I turned in the assignment before working for Purdue, as I did not sign any contract that turned over ownership of prior software work to them. This could be somewhat of a problem for me, though, if I start a new project. I don't see myself doing that anytime soon, however, since I'm so busy with schoolwork and my existing projects.

I also want to add in closing that Purdue is, for the most part, very accepting of the GPL license for use in code, and will respect it. The thing that they take issue with the patent clause, particularly since they are protective of the Purdue Discovery Park, which makes heavy use of patents in order to fund start-up companies for grad students, among other things. I get the impression that it would be an odious burden for them to dig through their list of patents and note which patents might cover part of my contributions, in order to list them as exceptions (which the FSF permits). They told me something to that effect over the phone, the key phrase being something like (my words, not their words) "you're not an important enough entity to merit that kind of effort on our part". I don't feel particularly outraged at Purdue for this response, just annoyed with the difficulty of tracking down the people responsible for making the decision on my disclaimer — hence the posts which should hopefully make it easier for other students to get answers.